Calling all medical app developers – please help with “Guidance and Advice Most Needed by App Developers”

UK-based PatientView, and its sister organisation, myhealthapps.net, in conjunction with Germany-based Research2Guidance, and the App Quality Alliance, need your answers to a survey to help inform the creation of guidelines designed to improve the quality and focus of health, wellness, and disability apps. This will be be launched at the European Health Forum Gastein in October 2015, which is attended by hundreds of health policymakers as well healthcare industry representatives.

The survey opens with a handful of short, anonymous, profiling questions. It then moves quickly on to 14 questions about issues that are absolutely key to the developers of health, wellness, and disability apps.

The survey will probably take a maximum of 20 minutes to complete. The results will be anonymised. If you would like a copy of the collated survey results (which will include the views of respondents who are other healthcare stakeholders), please indicate your interest at the end of the survey.

Our definitions

Telehealth and Telecare Aware posts pointers to a broad range of news items. Authors of those items often use terms 'telecare' and telehealth' in inventive and idiosyncratic ways. Telecare Aware's editors can generally live with that variation. However, when we use these terms we usually mean:

• Telecare: from simple personal alarms (AKA pendant/panic/medical/social alarms, PERS, and so on) through to smart homes that focus on alerts for risk including, for example: falls; smoke; changes in daily activity patterns and 'wandering'. Telecare may also be used to confirm that someone is safe and to prompt them to take medication. The alert generates an appropriate response to the situation allowing someone to live more independently and confidently in their own home for longer.

• Telehealth: as in remote vital signs monitoring. Vital signs of patients with long term conditions are measured daily by devices at home and the data sent to a monitoring centre for response by a nurse or doctor if they fall outside predetermined norms. Telehealth has been shown to replace routine trips for check-ups; to speed interventions when health deteriorates, and to reduce stress by educating patients about their condition.

Telecare Aware's editors concentrate on what we perceive to be significant events and technological and other developments in telecare and telehealth. We make no apology for being independent and opinionated or for trying to be interesting rather than comprehensive.